50 Fun Facts About Extinction

The dodo, a flightless bird last reliably seen in 1662, lived only on which Indian Ocean island?

Mauritius had no mammal predators, so the dodo probably nested on the ground. The pigs, rats and macaques that arrived with people plundered those nests.

The Chicxulub crater, left by the asteroid blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs, lies buried beneath which country?

Mexico hides the crater under its Yucatán Peninsula, where geophysicists who were looking for petroleum found it in the late 1970s.

Which North American bird, once flocking in the billions, died out when Martha died at Cincinnati Zoo in 1914?

The passenger pigeon may once have been the most numerous bird on Earth, but intense hunting and the felling of its forests finished it within decades.

Which striped marsupial predator died out in 1936, when the last known animal died at Hobart Zoo?

The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, was blamed for killing sheep, and the island's government paid a bounty of one pound for each dead adult.

Which Ice Age giant survived on Arctic Wrangel Island until 4,000 years ago, after Egypt's Great Pyramid was built?

The woolly mammoth had vanished from the mainland by about 10,000 years ago, but an isolated island herd hung on for some 6,000 years more.

Which fish, known only from fossils tens of millions of years old, was caught alive off South Africa in 1938?

The coelacanth was spotted in a local fisherman's catch by museum curator Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, and the living genus Latimeria is named after her.

Lonesome George, who died in the Galápagos in 2012 as the last of his kind, was which type of animal?

Giant tortoise George was first seen on Pinta Island in 1971, and years of pairing him with related females produced only eggs that failed to hatch.

Which 1962 book by Rachel Carson documented the environmental harm caused by indiscriminate use of the pesticide DDT?

Silent Spring led to an American ban on the chemical in farming, a major factor in the bald eagle's comeback from near-extinction in the lower 48 states.

Which giant prehistoric shark, with teeth over 18 centimetres long, died out about 3.6 million years ago?

Megalodon means big tooth, and teeth are most of what survives, because a shark's skeleton is cartilage and fossilises poorly.

Which naturalist, visiting the Falkland Islands in 1833, predicted the tame wolf living there would soon be extinct?

Charles Darwin was proved right in 1876, after settlers who saw the Falkland Islands wolf as a threat to their sheep had poisoned it and hunted it for fur.

Which rare metal, scarce in Earth's crust, enriches the clay layer laid down worldwide when the dinosaurs died?

Iridium at hundreds of times its normal level turned up in that layer around the world, which led a father-and-son team to propose an asteroid impact in 1980.

The Great Dying, Earth's most severe known extinction, struck about 252 million years ago at the end of which period?

The Permian closed with the loss of an estimated 81% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrate species.

Eruptions blamed for the Great Dying buried a vast stretch of which region under lava?

Siberia still holds that lava as rock formations called traps, and the gases the eruptions released heated the planet and turned the oceans acidic.

Which sea creatures, among the most successful early animals, died out after almost 270 million years in the oceans?

Trilobites had been declining for a long time, and only a handful of species were left when the worst mass extinction of all finished them off.

Which French naturalist showed around 1800 that some fossil bones came from species that no longer existed?

Georges Cuvier compared fossil bones with those of living elephants and showed they came from animals no longer alive, an idea many of his peers called speculation.

Luis Alvarez, who proposed with his son that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs, held a Nobel Prize in which field?

Physics brought Alvarez the 1968 prize for particle discoveries made with hydrogen bubble chambers, twelve years before the dinosaur theory.

The mass extinction that killed three-quarters of all species 66 million years ago ended which geological period?

The Cretaceous closed with the loss of every non-avian dinosaur, while sea turtles and crocodilians were among the few large animals to come through.

Which gas, released by microbes about 2.4 billion years ago, is thought to have killed off much of early life?

Oxygen from cyanobacteria built up in the air and shallow seas, an upheaval inferred to have been a mass extinction but left off the usual lists.

Glyptodonts, heavily armoured plant-eaters of Ice Age South America, were giant relatives of which living animals?

Armadillos were suspected from the start: the missionary who first recorded a glyptodont shell in the 1750s said it came from a giant one, and he was right.

The ongoing extinction event caused by human activity is usually named after which geological epoch, the current one?

The Holocene extinction is running at an estimated 100 to 1,000 times the natural background rate at which species disappear.

Which flightless North Atlantic seabird, the original owner of the name penguin, was last confirmed alive in 1844?

The great auk's last confirmed pair was killed on Eldey, off Iceland, while incubating an egg, at the request of a merchant who wanted specimens.

Which flightless birds, the tallest reaching 3.6 metres, died out within a century of people settling New Zealand?

Moa were the largest land animals in New Zealand and had just one predator, a huge eagle, until overhunting by the first settlers finished them.

Which giant, slow-moving mammal of the North Pacific was hunted to extinction within 27 years of Europeans finding it?

Steller's sea cow grazed on kelp around a few remote islands and was so easy to catch that hunters wiped it out for its meat, fat and hide.

The quagga, a South African animal extinct in the wild by 1878, was a subspecies of which living species?

The plains zebra's lost southern form was striped mainly on the head and neck, and a breeding project now selects zebras for that look.

Which Ice Age predator, found by the hundred in the La Brea Tar Pits, had canine teeth up to 28 centimetres long?

Smilodon, the best-known saber-toothed cat, could open its jaws wider than any modern cat, but its canines were slender and fragile, made for precise bites.

The golden toad, a bright orange species last seen in 1989, lived only in a cloud forest in which country?

Costa Rica featured the golden toad on posters promoting its biodiversity, but after 1989 extensive searches never found another one.

The baiji, a freshwater dolphin declared functionally extinct in 2006, lived only in which Asian river?

The Yangtze dolphin was nicknamed the goddess of the river by local fishermen, yet a six-week survey by 30 researchers failed to find a single one.

Which wild goat became in 2003 the first extinct animal to be cloned, though the newborn lived only minutes?

The Pyrenean ibex is the only animal to have gone extinct twice: the clone, grown from tissue of the last female, died of a lung defect.

Sudan, who died in Kenya in 2018 under round-the-clock armed guard, was the last male of which rhinoceros subspecies?

Northern white rhinos numbered just three when Sudan died, and one of the two left behind was his own daughter, Najin.

The aurochs, whose last known animal died in a Polish forest in 1627, was the wild ancestor of which livestock?

Cattle descend from the aurochs, a horned giant that Ice Age artists painted on cave walls at sites such as Lascaux.

Which US president, calling earlier conservation efforts inadequate, signed the Endangered Species Act into law in 1973?

Richard Nixon signed it a decade after the bald eagle, the national symbol, was found to be in danger of dying out across the lower 48 states.

Which organization publishes the Red List, whose nine categories for species include Least Concern and Extinct?

The IUCN counts three of those groups as threatened: Vulnerable, Endangered and Critically Endangered.

Which biblical figure gives his name to a taxon that vanishes from the fossil record and then reappears much later?

Lazarus, the man raised from the dead in the Gospel of John, lends his name to groups that seem to die out and then turn up again, sometimes alive.

Elephant birds, flightless giants up to 3 metres tall that laid the largest eggs known, lived only on which island?

Madagascar's elephant birds were plant-eaters, and European travellers in the 1830s were still coming across their giant eggs and eggshells.

A chytrid fungus that infects the skin has been linked to declines and extinctions among which group of animals?

Amphibians are attacked in the outer layers of their skin, and the disease kills every animal in some populations while causing only scattered deaths in others.

The brown tree snake, an accidental stowaway, wiped out most of the native birds of which Pacific island?

Guam offered the snakes plenty of prey and no predators, and they have been known to grow larger there than in their native range.

Which extinct humans, named after a German valley, vanished from most of Europe by about 40,000 years ago?

Neanderthals interbred with modern humans before they disappeared, so people with ancestry from outside Africa still carry small amounts of their DNA.

Which North American grazing animal fell from an estimated 60 million to just 541 by 1889 before conservation saved it?

Bison were slaughtered so thoroughly that their descendants still lack genetic diversity, a lasting mark of the near-extinction.

Which giant vulture was down to 27 birds when the last wild one was captured on Easter Sunday 1987?

The California condor was bred in captivity and released again, including over the Grand Canyon area and Zion National Park.

Przewalski's horse, once extinct in the wild, has been returned since the 1990s to its native range in which country?

Mongolia's released herds bred so well that the horse's Red List status improved from extinct in the wild to critically endangered and then to endangered.

Which North American predator, declared extinct in 1979, was rediscovered two years later near Meeteetse, Wyoming?

The black-footed ferret relies on prairie dogs for up to 90% of its diet, so it collapsed when those colonies were destroyed and struck by plague.

Which creature, nicknamed the tree lobster, was thought extinct until 24 were found on the sea stack Ball's Pyramid?

The stick insect vanished from Lord Howe Island after a supply ship ran aground in 1918 and let rats ashore; the survivors clung to one bare rock.

Which North American insect, whose 1875 swarm was estimated at 12.5 trillion, vanished entirely within about 30 years?

The Rocky Mountain locust formed the greatest concentration of animals ever recorded, a swarm spread over about 198,000 square miles.

Which plant, pictured on the coins of ancient Cyrene, was claimed to have gone extinct in Roman times?

Silphium grew only in a narrow strip of what is now eastern Libya, and Pliny reported that the last known stalk was given to Emperor Nero as a curiosity.

Which word, proposed in the journal Nature in 1996, means the last individual of a species, as Lonesome George was?

Endling drew rival coinages from the journal's readers within weeks, among them ender and terminarch.

The Xerces blue, the first American butterfly known to be lost to urban development, lived on dunes in which city?

San Francisco spread across the coastal sand dunes of its Sunset District, and the butterfly, first described in 1852, lost the only home it had.

The Bramble Cay melomys, a rodent from a tiny coral island, is described as the first mammal driven extinct by what?

Climate change raised the sea around its five-acre home at the tip of the Great Barrier Reef, and the official report named sea level rise as the root cause.

The first frozen zoo, storing cells from threatened animals, was set up in 1972 at the zoo in which city?

San Diego pathologist Kurt Benirschke started the collection, which has grown to samples from more than 1,300 species and subspecies.

Père David's deer, saved by a herd on an English duke's estate, was returned in the 1980s to which native country?

China received several dozen deer from the Duke of Bedford's herd at Woburn Abbey, which had been built up from a few animals bought from Berlin Zoo.

Seeds about 2,000 years old, dug up at Herod the Great's palace on Masada, were grown into which type of tree?

The date palm that sprouted first, a male, was nicknamed Methuselah after the longest-lived person in the Bible, and it flowered in 2011.